Tag: writing
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Reincarnation
—after Wallace Stevens I placed a tattered sonnet in a Mason jar on a low hill in Tennessee, adrift and lost, and waited for rains to wash my frail poem far eastward, tumbling to brook, to stream, river-tossed past roots and slim hulls to wave swells of the sea. By current shape and…
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That’s my answer too
The Artist’s Way & The War of Art Treating writer’s block is like untangling a really, really long, old rope. As you pull one loop through another, attempting a small liberation, you unwittingly add another knot. This knot and that kink reveal themselves as symptoms of some giant tangle that’s been there decades, and you’re…
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Art and Obedience
Now that 2021 is nearly halfway through, accountability might just become the word of the year. It pops up in all kinds of commentary about policing and the behavior of our elected officials. “There is no ‘healing’ from this without accountability,” tweeted Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the days following the Capitol riot. I myself bristle…
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Prufrock’s Peach
Recently I read a book in which a pastor asks her congregants their #1 most frequent thoughts about themselves. People wrote these thoughts on sticky notes and posted them to a giant board inside the church. Thoughts like, “I am not enough,” and “I won’t be okay until I lose weight.” If we’re honest, as…
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Creative Writing Jobs wiki (a.k.a. — wiki academic job )
Creative writing jobs wiki page for Academic Positions in Creative Writing that begin in 2021. See also: English Literature Positions 2020-2021 See also: Starbucks Job Board See also: How to Start Your Own Tutoring Business from a Single Craigslist Ad See also: Podcast: How to Start Your Own Editing Business from a Single Craigslist Ad,…
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Goofs & Breakthroughs Along The Artist’s Way
If you’re the kind of person who mocks The Artist’s Way—for its weird amount of God talk, its repeated commands to take yourself on dates, how author Julia Cameron recommends you walk around your yard gathering a rock and leaf collection—you should probably stop reading here. I must speak my peace and defend this book,…
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The Notwrite
You are a miracle of avoidance. So you walk. Walk until your hip flexors are leather straps pulling your abdomen taut toward your legs. Your head floats aloft, aware of little but the BQE ocean beneath the Promenade. It’s less like exercise than it means to be, this walk. Wind and sun carry you along.…
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Confessions of a Non-Best-Selling Author
My overnight at the Convention Center started out about as uneventful as any other shift I had pulled over the past few weeks. I was already one month retired from the post office, in a funky college section of Boston called Allston, situated nearly dead center between Boston College and crosstown rival Boston University. Allston…
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The Alchemy of Advice
For Rhina E That poem that you have to write will make you write it, you told us, eventually. Before it even is, it makes us ache inside? Is that the way it gets to be, like other fruits of creativity? As seeds spawn trees, so, for the simple sake of what is not, one…
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Pfeilstorchs
Migration was difficult to know. It’s not surprising. Who could say why birds leave for a time, where they go? Aristotle thought that birds just transmuted into a different species when the weather changed. Later, it was assumed that birds hibernated. Charles Morton believed they flew to the moon. Even in the 19th century naturalists…
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This Lethal Practice
And here, a poet in a forgotten state. Caucasian Albania, we call it, though it was in what is now Azerbaijan. We don’t even know what they called it. And yet, there the poet. He’s brute forcing a piece as we watch. The trappings are familiar. A cat on a windowsill by candlelight. A half-eaten…
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Boumediene v. Bush: Unanswered Issues and Current Moral Codification
In Boumediene v. Bush, the U.S Supreme Court was faced with a post-colonial issue regarding overseas authority and correlating precedents. Broadly, the question arose—for a third time since Rasul v. Bush (2004) and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)—whether constitutional rights extend to non-sovereign territories under U.S control. More specifically, the case encompassed a question of whether…